When I was eleven years old I was alone a lot. It wasn't the obvious kind of alone. It was subtle, it was cunning. It slithered around my wrists and pooled in the hollows of my collarbone, and sunk its teeth into my lips and tried to make me speak. I wasn't upset about being a Slytherin- I never was. I was still new to everything, new and alone- Slytherins didn't make friends, because there were too many things that were expected of them. No, Slytherins were divided, some of us wanting to be all that we were told to be, others wanting to become different, to leave the restraints made for us. We were, after all, Slytherins. Didn't we make our own rules?
I was used to being alone, in a way- the twins would run around without me, they wouldn't play with me because they didn't like how I played, and they didn't want me to mess up their games anyways. I was used to watching them fool around outside in the lavender fields in the backyard, the two of them not needing anything else except each other. And then when that kid came along, they let her play with them, and I realised that they were excluding me on purpose.
At first the kid didn't understand it. She would flutter between me and the twins, asking questions. She never stopped asking questions- not until she got to Hogwarts, anyways. Who was i? Did I want to play? How many freckles did I have? What was I reading? Did I know that I had toothpaste on my mouth? Did I know that my hair looked nice today?
No, no, no I didn't know, and I didn't want to play. I didn't want to play, I lied. Go away.
Would you consider the twins best friends, or does it not count because they're twins? Was she their friend? Was she good enough? Funny, did I even really know the answer? They were my siblings, weren't they? Shouldn't I know? How old was I? What was it like to be a year older? Why didn't I like her or the twins? Was it because I was older?
I didn't know the answers, so I just ignored, her, and eventually, she'd go away. The older she got the more she stayed away. But she used to come over to where I was reading and lean over on one hand and touch my face with the other, like she was fascinated with the way I looked, like I was a thing to be studied and understood. But I don't think she ever understood.
There are two extreme kinds of Slytherins. The nice ones and the mean ones. Basically. Then there were the ones in between, all different shades of green. Who were we? The Slytherins were in the midst of a sort of identity crisis when I arrived. It was Traditionalists versus Liberals, and I was not going to get caught up in the fight.
So I got put into the group of all the other kids who didn't want to fight, but somehow we still managed to form groups within ourselves- the ones who were skillful at implying things, the ones who were quiet and influential and made the Traditionalists vs Liberals conflict into their plaything, in a way reinforcing the Slytherin stereotype without anyone knowing. I was friends with the talkers who stayed in the lines while they were drawing new ones.
What was happening? What were they saying? They said words that meant more than one thing and they said more than one thing that directed you to one idea that they made feel like yours. Eventually I took up the game and got good at it. I've had four years of practice. Now it's my turn to confuse the first years and play grownup games with other kids my age.
When the twins and that kid showed up, they irritated me. They didn't belong here. Hogwarts was my home, a home free of the things that they had made me suffer through, and now they were back again. I could never escape them. I was glad they weren't in Slytherin. Except that kid- the one who always asked questions. She didn't talk as much, but the questions still bubbled up in her eyes and she looked around with the open wonder of someone who was about to be hurt. I wanted to hurt her. To smack that look right off of her face. But in a way, I wanted to do it so that no one else could. She and I had something that other people didn't. I could still remember the questions, the freckle counting and reading books over each other's shoulders. There wasn't a lot to us, but there was still something different that I viciously claimed as mine.
I'm not good at making friends- I had never learned how. So I went back to my war council waging war on itself and played their games hard enough to make myself the game master, forgetting about the time spent with the girl who asked questions. But in the back of my head, I still called her mine.
And the twins.
Ellie goes to Ravenclaw, she goes and I watch her, I watch the color drain from her face, and the panic that sets in- she was the illiterate forced to scramble to keep up, and I felt satisfied that she would suffer as much as she had made me suffer.
Joel goes to Hufflepuff, the madman confined to the padded cell, his disappointment liquefying slowly and turning into irritation that built up and swelled into rage, and I feel satisfied that he would be as angry and alone as he made me.
I watch them, the three of them, I watch and never really interfere, just throwing out the appropriate amount of insults, just enough to keep them in line, enough to tell them that I was in charge. They didn't know, they couldn't tell when they had been subjugated. It was satisfying, to know that for once in my life I was the one pulling the strings.
That girl never spoke to me first. She never looked at me. Not until I leaned across the table, smirking, and said something that pulled up the strings attached to her head. She looked at me, at my eyes, at the color she'd spent hours trying to describe, and then across the freckles that she'd counted, then recounted, coming up with a different number every single time. She looks at me and doesn't say a word, eyes dark and blank and unquestioning, sedated with defeat. It had been too late. She wasn't the kid that I remembered. But I didn't care.
Ellie avoided me. Afraid of the insults I tossed at her. I skirted dangerously around the edges of the word that sent her into a panic- dyslexia. She shied away, afraid of it, practically handing me power over her. When she talked to me her words were skittish and filled with fear, yellowed out and stringy. She was easy to move around. Easy to rule. She was brittle and too afraid to break. She looked at me and only saw someone that threatened her, someone that brought her worst fear on her. She saw me and I reminded her of the time spent telling me to go away, telling me that I couldn't be a part of the world she and Joel and the kid had been a part of.
Joel and I fought a lot. We always fought. He was the unstable one, the loose cannon that crashed through other people but was stuck ricocheting around his own mind. Poor, pathetic Joel always tormented himself with thoughts of freedom, of a life that was as fast-paced as he was, but oh, the irony of it, he was a Hufflepuff, someone who was supposed to be loyal and true. He was tied to the stake of trustworthiness and screaming to be released. He was all tied up and I could hit him without being worried about really being hit back.
I had never thought about death all that much- not in a way that applied to me. Not in a way that made me stop and care. I was not afraid of death, I was afraid of having no influence on the world. So death wasn't anything that I'd ever thought about. if I died, I died. So what. It was a DQ, it wasn't defeat. Death wasn't something i was afraid of.
And then one day I looked at Ellie and that was all I saw, drawn dark into the circles under her eyes like scars, and it startled me. I saw the intent in her, to pull out of the game, to stop playing, to abandon the promise of the finish line, wherever it was. My own sister, ready to die. I read it so easily off of her face. I don't know how it made me feel. But I was still the one in charge, and I pulled her strings out and away from death only to see her hanging there, limp, like she was already dead, swinging in a noose that I had made.
And then one day I looked at Joel and death was all I saw, in the angry frustration with which he jogged around the quidditch pitch- Joel had always been a runner, always eager to move, to escape. He didn't like flying, flying meant that he had to depend on magic to carry him. No, he liked to run, liked to feel the strides pull long at his legs. I looked at Joel running around, and in the posture of his shoulders and the hang of his head I saw the same defeat that I saw in Ellie- the twins always matched each other, even when they weren't trying. But I was still the one in charge and I put up some barrier to stop him from running into madness. But he kept throwing himself into the wall, until he knocked himself senseless and lay in a heap on the ground. My own brother, ready to die.
And then one day I saw a girl standing on the ledge of the astronomy tower with her hands shoved into her pockets and a head full of things that I had said, whispering jump- the questioner now left with an answer that was good enough for her. I saw the idea resting passively in the back of her mind- I had put that idea there, on accident or maybe to prove my power to myself, I don't know. I could see it unfolding and taking a hold of her, taking a hold of the very same girl who sat for hours away from my tormentors and read with me until it was too dark to see. My only friend, ready to die. And I had to undo the things that I did, but I didn't know how. I always planned things out. I never made an error. I was unused to failure, and now I didn't know how to undo what had been done.
But I never meant to kill anyone, so I pulled her down and she walked away.
